Martin knows that I have had this problem for the past year. I too am writing a very long (book-length) document with lots of footnotes and internal cross-references. I frequently need to add new ones or edit existing ones; so working in Draft Mode is not an option for me. Because of the internal cross-references I cannot subdivide the document. If there were a feature like the Master Document that MS Word tried a few years back, that would be one way to help with the problem. But in the mean time I have to work against a deadline and cannot wait for another few years to see if NWP develops these features. So I too have moved to Mellel for the time being. But Mellel lacks many vital features in NWP, which makes me wish that NWP could do something sooner rather than later. I am happy to see so many of you users of NWP that feel this is a problem, as I do. Let us all encourage and urge Nisus to make this a top priority.

I have to say that, much as I love NWP ... and I've been using it since before it was Nisus Writer, if I were to be writing a long document of that sort, I wouldn't be doing the text creation part of it in any word-processor, I'd be using Scrivener, perhaps even working through Multi-Markdown within Scrivener to handle all the complex cross-referencing, and then leave the detailed layout work to be done in Nisus when I'd got the actual text together. On a very long and complex document, all the behind the scenes drawing out of the details of the layout all the time must give a processing overhead.

Mark

NB I have no connection with Scrivener, other than as a user of it since late 2006, especially since it works extremely well in conjunction with NWP.

I fully agree with Mark. In similar cases, Scrivener is the way to go. And it should be noted that the most recent version of Scrivener (2.3), which was shipped last week, has greatly improved import and export of doc(x)-documents. This makes it possible to deliver a document as a Word document without having to work with Word.

I'm very happy that Scrivener is so helpful to Mark and Timotheus, but I have tried it for my own work and found it unsatisfactory. My answer will have to come from NWP. I have confidence that in time they will find a solution.

Wouldn't a 64-bit version of NWP address some of the slowness issues, especially on machines with more than 4 GB of RAM? The smallest mac I have has 16 GB of RAM and the largest have 32 GB. I, too, have noticed the slowdown on documents of modest size, when there are many notes. Indexing is also nearly impossible with a large document.

There is one thing about this whole discussion that is a matter of some concern to me.

This issue is a clearly very relevant one, and has been known for years, and discussed many times on this forum. Yet our Nisus friends, who otherwise are always extremely helpful, in this particular case have always stayed away from saying "This is indeed a nasty thing, we are working on it, and in the next version the problem will be solved". And I see only two possible explanations for this lack of reassurance: either our Nisus friends don't fully realize that this issue makes it impossible to work with Nisus for people who out of necessity or by vocation write long documents with many notes, or they perfectly realize the gravity of the problem, but know that it can only be solved in a very time consuming way: by rewriting a large part of Nisus's code. I dearly hope the latter is not the case; but sometimes I fear this might be the situation.

I have the same fear as Timotheus does. I am happy that for the time being Scrivener is a help to many of you, and for me Mellel has been my refuge. This is not a happy solution, since it is really Nisus with its many nice features that has brought all of us reading this to this place. It is a real pity that Nisus has this problem, and make no illusions - it *is* s a serious problem for us. I hate to be always bugging Martin and others of the helpful Nisus people, asking every month or two is there is any chance of a fix to this in the next build. But we are in a kind of a bind. I was earlier in a similar bind with MS Word, which I found met my needs entirely until I began writing Hebrew and Arabic in mid-sentence with English or German, and found that MS had left the Mac version unable to handle this, while the Windows version handled right-to-left in the midst of left-to-right with ease! There too I can do nothing about it, unless I want to switch to the Windows OS, which I am not about to do. Life is full of these dilemmas; let's just hope that the NIsus people will really make this a priority and give us a solution soon.

I am writing a book, 100+ pages, and NWP has become very slow in saving, editing and writing. Beachball olé!
Is there anything I can do to be able to write within that document as fast as I would in a 4 page document?

I think it's really time you guys bit the bullet and rewrote the underlying code. Don't you think?

Otherwise there will be this horrible fog of discontent that eats away at your user base. To mingle a few metaphors.

I mean: the problem is so serious... No? If academics cannot use Nisus Pro because of the updating footnotes problem, which other word processors just don't suffer from, at all, then you really have to go back to basics, or lose those users. And they are your ideal users! Gee, isn't it obvious?

I recently completed my dissertation (122 pages, 25,000 words, 170,000 characters, 309 footnotes, less than 10 cross-references, ~20 illustrations), and did the second phase of my work in Nisus. This comes after a long translation, with a lot of comments (I really mean a lot), I did earlier. With both jobs I had these footnote-related issues:

- wrong line spacing (solved by breaking a line in the footnote, and then rejoining it);
- occasional slowness while typing (solved by waiting a few seconds, letting Nisus do its work in the background).

While I admit the second issue is particularly boring, it also occured not so often to make my work impossible or painful. I had just to take a breath of air at times.

Obviously, I would like it to be solved, and maybe my texts are much simpler than others, and the problem might be more apparent for others or other kinds of documents.

It is now been years since this thread started and I am still seeing this at times. Not universally at all points in a document, but often. And it seems to even change with a single page! Some paragraphs are fine, others are not. This is a book under 200 pages but with hundreds of footnotes. Editing is so painful!